Satisfaction = Organizational Commitment?

My colleague Dr. Rick Froman runs our faculty opinion and climate surveys. He's been trying to explain to me that when we in administration think of satisfaction, we tend to think of "constituency needs" and so we tend to operate like politicians making campaign promises to various groups. But in practice, "satisfaction" is probably more closely connected to someone's basic (and original?) commitment to the organization (and its mission?) than anything else. That fact might indicate that we should be paying even more attention than we already do to "institutional fit" and compatibility with the mission of the place in the hiring process than to some of the professional competencies (what courses can this person cover) that we typically focus on. Southwest Airline's adage "hire for personality and train for skill" is probably an example of this type of thinking. Rick will probably tinker with our faculty satisfaction survey to see if we can get at this correlation more directly at JBU than we have in the past.

Review of Gladwell's "The Tipping Point"

Took me awhile to get to this one (it's been out since 2000), but it's still a great read, though not as interesting to me as Gladwell's "Blink." The basic argument of Tipping Point, is that small things can have big consequences, particularly if a few key people are great "connectors," "salesmen," and "mavens," if the "context" is ripe, or if you've found a way to make your message (or product) particularly "sticky." Much of reality, therefore, functions more like an epidemic with exponential swings up and down for reasons that seem almost impossible to predict in advance or even to determine after the fact (witness the recent financial collapse).

Gladwell offers a number of case studies of how this process works, the best being, from my perspective, the Paul Revere story about how a counterpart attempting a similar ride on that same night had almost no effect compared to the great effect that Revere had. Gladwell's a very effective story teller.

Some of what he said could have direct application for our educational setting and is probably closely connected to the whole "engaged learning" approach in which the goal is not so much to review facts but to find ways to create enthusiasm for learning (a contagion) and to help make that learning life-long (sticky).

Another interesting application of the "Tipping Point" philosophy is to the world of marketing and sales in which Gladwell argues that "word of mouth" is becoming even more important and not less as we might suspect in this age of efficient electronic communication. But what happens when everyone can receive everything on-line is that we become "immune" to all of this stuff being thrown at us, and we only really trust what people we really know, and know to be experts (mavens), tell us. Those mavens help us cut through the clutter, and so they are increasingly the unofficial gatekeepers to modern marketing success.

Which reminded me very much of the whole "new markets" initiative that we've been working on at JBU in which we attempt find key influencers at important organizations and market to them instead of just trying to do a mass appeal via print ads or some other major media approach. That would make sense in a "tipping point" world. We'll see how well it works at JBU.

The culture of higher education organizations

I found this to be a helpful summary of some of the major issues facing higher education.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/10/16/tierney

The Scandal of the Republican Mind?

In our evangelical circles there's a famous book by Mark Noll called "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind." Many of us in Christian higher education have spent our entire lives trying to overcome that scandal.

What David Brooks points out is that despite much previous effort to establish a solid conservative mind, the Republican establishment in recent years has increasingly tossed aside its philosophical and intellectual roots in favor of cultivating the "common touch." 30 years ago, for example, Buckley was the Republican intellectual leader in various media outlets. Now it's Rush. I like Sarah Palin a lot, but when she rejects not just D.C. but the entire east coast (where almost 50% of all colleges and universities are located), and the Republican party lauds her for saying it, we appear to have our own "scandal of the Republican mind" going, from which, I fear, it will take us a very long time to recover.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/opinion/10brooks.html?em

Transcending the faculty-administration divide

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/10/07/estwood

It’s a long article, but the gist is this. Higher education (especially in Research I institutions) is increasingly sclerotic because faculty’s goals are disciplinary, personal, and very high stakes (up or out) while administrator’s goals are campus-wide and impersonal. These two worlds are drifting further and further apart, making higher education more and more unwieldy. Faculty who become administrators are particularly conflicted as try to bridge this gap.

The answers these authors propose are five. Emphasize teaching and service more (and scholarship less), have the budget process be more transparent, do a better job with faculty development, organize into smaller groups, and allow faculty (individually or in groups) to “own” some of the tough decisions. In short, public, research I schools should become more like us.

Community and rule of 150

I'm finally reading through "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell about how little things can make a big difference. I just finished his chapter about the rule of 150, and it finally explained something that I've been hearing at JBU for years about the supposed loss of community and why that may have happened.

Most have said that the fundamental change is just one of size. But what is it about size that matters, and when does that size problem become significant? Gladwell argues (with lots of evidence) that our brains are wired to handle no more than about 150 relationships at a time. Any group that gets larger than that "tips" into needing a whole host of bureaucratic and heirarchical structures in order to accomplish things instead of being able to rely on informal conversations and personal relationships. The Gore company (of Gore-tex fame) doesn't allow any of their plants to get larger than 150 employees, for example, and they don't have any heirarchy (everyone is an "associate"), budgets, strategic planning processes, salary scale, employee handbook, etc. As long as they spin off each a subset of a plant as soon as a group gets near 150, the system works (and apparently works incredibly well). Hutterites use the same organizing principle.

So, to return to the JBU situation, when did we start hearing laments about the loss of community at JBU? From those I talked to, it's when we were about half the size we are now, i.e. roughly at 150-200 employees. Coincidence? I think not. And that means that we'll never be able to restore the campus-wide sense of community we used to have. The best we can hope to do is follow the "small group" model of having a series of smaller semi-autonomous groups that we manage simultaneously, which is, by default, what I think we're increasingly doing.